Customer relationship management (“CRM”) systems allow businesses to manage the relationships with their customers, including the capture, storage, and analysis of customer information. In many CRM systems, electronic mail (“e-mail”) is the preferred method of communicating with customers. When an e-mail is sent from a CRM system to a customer, a sent e-mail activity is created in the CRM system to track the communication. The sent e-mail activity may be associated with a customer order, a customer account number, or other type of information that uniquely identifies the context of the e-mail message.
When a customer replies to an e-mail message sent from a CRM system, many CRM systems will create a new response e-mail activity. In order to group all related e-mail activities for a particular context, it is necessary to identify e-mail messages as being CRM-related and, if so, to correlate each related response e-mail activity with other pre-existing e-mail activities. In this way, each response e-mail activity will be linked to the same customer order or customer account number as the original, pre-existing e-mail activities. Quick access can then be had to all of the communications to and from a customer using only the customer account number or customer order.
In the past, several methods have been utilized to identify response messages and to correlate response e-mail messages with a pre-existing e-mail message. These previous methods, however, each suffer from significant drawbacks. In the first method, an e-mail conversation thread identifier is inserted into an x-mailer header (“x-header”) of each sent e-mail message. If the thread identifier is present in the response e-mail, it can be utilized to correlate the response e-mail to the original e-mail. While this method is generally suitable for e-mail messages sent on a local area network, this method generally does not work for messages sent over the Internet. This is because many Internet e-mail servers systematically strip x-headers from incoming and outgoing mail messages. As a result, response e-mail messages from these systems will not include the original thread identifier, thereby making correlation using the thread identifier impossible.
In the second method, a tracking code is placed in the subject line, message body, or another field of a sent e-mail message. If the tracking code is present in the same field of the response message, the tracking code can be utilized to correlate the response message with the originally sent e-mail. However, the use of a tracking code is seen by some organizations as being intrusive in that it frequently requires the tracking code to be placed in a visible e-mail field like the subject line. As a result, some organizations are unwilling to place such data in the fields of e-mail messages sent from their CRM systems. Moreover, a tracking code placed in the subject field or message body of an e-mail message is subject to modification or deletion, which makes identification and correlation impossible. A tracking code placed in the message body of an e-mail may also require significant processing to locate, because the entire message body of the e-mail must be searched to locate the tracking code.
It is with respect to these considerations and others that the disclosure made herein is provided.